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Life Beyond Distributed Transactions

By Pat Helland
Communications of the ACM, February 2017, Vol. 60 No. 2, Pages 46-54
10.1145/3009826
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Life Beyond Distributed Transactions, illustration — Credit: Mikael Hvidtfeldt Christensen

Transactions are amazingly powerful mechanisms, and I've spent the majority of my almost 40-year career working on them. In 1982, I first worked to provide transactions on the Tandem NonStop System. This system had a mean time between failures measured in years⁴ and included a geographically distributed two-phase commit offering excellent availability for strongly consistent transactions.

New innovations, including Google's Spanner,² offer strongly consistent transactional environments at extremely large scale with excellent availability. Building distributed transactions to support highly available applications is a great challenge that has inspired excellent innovation and amazing technology. Unfortunately, this is not broadly available to application developers.

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